According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, for the second year in a row, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free* to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we recommend: “The...

TODAY: In 1609, Shakespeare’s Sonnets are first published in London, perhaps illicitly, by the publisher Thomas Thorpe.  “She cooked like she lived and filmed, with feeling.” Pulitzer-Prize winner Ilyon Woo on the craft lessons she learned from the late filmmaker Dai Sil Kim Gibson. | Lit Hub Craft What do clocks, cameras, and cracked doll...

That winter we were poor. Gudrun made eleven hundred dollars a month, but rent and groceries and student loan payments took away a thousand. My own funds were dwindling. At the beginning of December, I borrowed sixty dollars from eleven different people to cover my rent. Broccoli-and-instant-noodles was a standby meal. Christmas travel wasn’t possible....

In March of 2020, I picked up Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees. The paperback had been sitting unread on a shelf in my living room for years. Nearing the final pages, when the protagonist travels overland by tree branch, a stranger appeared unexpectedly in the text. “Je suis le Prince Andrei,” says this man, and I felt the same swell of elation...

When my daughter was a year old, my mother handed me a worn-out copy of Pearl S. Buck’s The Child Who Never Grew (1950). The act of giving me this book felt significant, like an inheritance that she passed on to me. She, as the mother of a child with disabilities, passed it on to me, another mother of a child with disabilities. My mother’s first child,...

I love long conversations. I love to be fully engaged in an exhausting give-and-take of overlapping stories and ideas. It’s the ease of sharing myself and seeing my eagerness reflected back that does it for me. Afterwards, I feel like I’ve been relieved of some burden I didn’t know I had. My deepest friendships and relationships have grown out of such...